1 Art As a Guaranty of Sanity: the Skin I Live in Tarja Laine, University Of

1 Art as a Guaranty of Sanity: The Skin I Live In Tarja Laine, University of Amsterdam Abstract: This article examines how the body in Pedro Almodóvar’s The Skin I Live In (2011) is incorporated in artistic creation and vice versa. Drawing upon Paul Crowther’s notion of an internal relation between the artist’s experience and the work of art, it argues that the film communicates a vision of embodied artistic practice as a redemptive strategy used to resolve trauma resulting from the traditional body/soul dualism. A film that outlines how artistic creation can both express fractured inner reality and purge it from negative affect, The Skin I Live In demonstrates how the artist can overcome trauma, reinvent the sense of self, and reclaim personal agency. The title of Pedro Almodóvar’s The Skin I Live In (La piel que habito, 2011) clearly communicates what the film is all about: the body as a prison with the skin as a barrier. This is already evident in the opening shots of the film, in which the image of the locked gate of El Cigarral, an isolated Toledo villa, dissolves into the image of a barred window. Behind this window a woman in a nude-coloured bodysuit is practicing yoga. This woman is Vera (Elena Anaya), a mysterious patient of Robert Ledgar (Antonio Banderas), a brilliant plastic surgeon haunted by past tragedies. Later we will discover that Vera used to be a man by the name of Vicente (a character played by Jan Cornet), who was abducted by Robert after his involvement in a fateful event at a wedding party that triggered his daughter Norma’s (Blanca Súarez) final mental breakdown and her subsequent suicide. After a period of imprisonment in a filthy cellar, Vicente is forced to undergo a sex change operation and he resurrects in the form of Robert’s deceased wife Gal. In many respects The Skin I Live In is best understood as a psychological thriller, in which Robert becomes a kind of modern-day Doctor Frankenstein, but whereas Frankenstein aimed at gaining insight into the creation of life and eventually did give life to his own creature, Robert’s goal is to manipulate life by means of transgenic mutation and plastic surgery. He is driven by a pathological obsession arising from his grief at the loss of loved ones, which develops into extreme revenge. Themes of desire, obsession and revenge are recurrent in Almodóvar’s oeuvre. His films have often been defined as melodramas originating from unresolved grief for “lost homosexual attachments” and especially the loss of the mother (Williams, “Melancholy Melodrama” 283; Bersani and Dutoit 117). Almodóvar’s melodramas can be described as examples of what Linda Williams has termed “body genre”, since they often stage the “spectacle of a body caught in the grip of intense sensation or emotion” (“Film Bodies” 4). In previous scholarship, the body in Almodóvar’s cinema has been studied from the perspective of (trans)gender and (homo)sexual identity politics (e.g. Smith; Maddison; Pérez), as a bodily/national metaphor (Acevedo-Muñoz; Kinder), and as a vehicle of performance (Albilla; Guse). This article also examines Almodóvar’s discourse of the body, but from a different perspective. It considers how the body in The Skin I Live In is incorporated in artistic creation and vice versa. Drawing upon Paul Crowther’s notion of an internal relation Alphaville: Journal of Film and Screen Media Issue 7, Summer 2014 2 between the artist’s experience and the work of art, it argues that the film communicates a vision of embodied artistic practice as a redemptive strategy used to resolve trauma resulting from the traditional body/soul dualism. A film that outlines how artistic creation can both express fractured inner reality and purge it from negative affect, The Skin I Live In demonstrates how the artist can overcome trauma, reinvent the sense of self, and reclaim personal agency. This process of expressing and purging negative affect is founded in the intensity with which the film both confirms and reverses the logic that, as John Berger has argued, has put women in the role of object to be viewed in art (45). The mise en scène of The Skin I Live In is dominated by copies of various works of art, most notably Venus of Urbino (1538) and Venus and Music (1547) both by Titian, as well as Dionisios encuentra a Ariadna en Naxos (2008) by Guillermo Pérez Villalta (which is typically considered a homage to Titian with its comparable theme and image composition). Both the film and the works of art featured in it explore the myth of the artist and artistic creation, and Vera herself can be seen as an artwork created by Robert. Even her first name Vera, which means “the true one”, is given to her by Robert, but towards the end of the film she chooses her own surname Cruz (crucifix, a symbol for suffering) as an important agential gesture.1 Vera is frequently seen on the huge screen in Robert’s bedroom in a frontal pose that resembles Venus in a Titian painting or in a posterior pose that references another Venus painting not seen in the film: Diego Velásquez’s The Rokeby Venus (1647–1651). In one scene Robert lies down in front of the screen, diagonally opposite to Vera, the artist as male subject admiring his creation, the female object (Figure 1). Figure 1: Artist admiring his work of art. The Skin I Live In (La piel que habito, Pedro Almodóvar, 2011). Pathé, 2011. Screenshot. This dualistic representation of male as subject and female as object of (artistic) creation is central to the first part of the film. We often witness Robert cultivating his invention of artificial skin, which he has created by combining the genetic material of a pig with that of a human being.2 In The Skin I Live In, the manufacturing of skin is a form of art, and plastic surgery is equivalent to artistic expression. After creating a new patch of skin, Robert is seen from a bird’s-eye perspective, while tightly fitting a piece of skin on a mannequin moulded to look exactly like his deceased wife; immediately afterwards he uses the same piece to form a new layer of skin on Vera’s neck (Figure 2). At this point the film deliberately offers no narrative backstory for the events on screen and we are led to believe that Vera is a creature Robert has fabricated from scratch, a living work of art or a transgenic Alphaville: Journal of Film and Screen Media Issue 7, Summer 2014 3 masterpiece. The film’s meticulous attention to the scientific details of the skin- manufacturing process also reinforces this false belief: as Vera murmurs to Robert in one early scene: “I’m yours… I’m made to measure for you.” Figure 2: Modelling skin. The Skin I Live In. Pathé, 2011. Screenshot. In the second half of the film, however, such dualistic images of artistic expression, with the male as subject and the female as object, disappear once Vera discovers her own creative potential. The artistic process involves an internal relation between the gender transformation and the resulting works of art, which enables Vera to respond to her trauma and mitigate its effects. This is signalled soon after her transformation is complete when Robert sends her makeup products, which she refuses to accept, apart from lipstick and an eye pencil. In some feminist discourse, makeup is considered an enforced adorning regime for the female body, used to reflect prevailing ideals of femininity.3 Instead of using these products to augment her sexual desirability, however, Vera employs them in her wall writings. First, she draws tally marks to count the days of her solitary confinement. As soon as she learns from housekeeper Marilia (Marisa Paredes) what the current day and year is, she starts writing down the actual dates, starting from the day that Vicente was abducted by Robert. During the course of her imprisonment she not only fills the wall with date marks, but also with sentences such as “El opio me ayuda a olvidar. Respiro. Respiro. Respiro. Sé que respiro” (“Opium helps me to forget. I breathe. I breathe. I breathe. I know how to breathe”). In addition, she executes drawings of yoga poses, and surrealist drawings that depict female bodies and torsos, standing or lying down with their heads entrapped in small houses.4 These self-conscious references to Louise Bourgeois’s work, most notably her sculpture Femme Maison (1994), invoke the traditional, Platonic metaphor of body as a prison-house, a hollow, evil, vessel-like space that encloses the soul.5 This metaphor is especially apt, if we consider Vera’s experience of skin as something alien, an impermeable boundary between the self and the world—a skin to “live in”. In Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, Julia Kristeva stresses the importance of skin and the role of the mother in establishing a boundary of self to an infant through constant caressing and touching. Through tactile contact, it is the mother who presents a skin to the child. In The Skin I Live In Vera’s skin does not “belong” to herself but to Robert, and it imprisons her inside her own body. Extraordinarily strong, the artificial skin Robert has created is resistant to extreme heat and insect bites, but lacks sensitivity to tactile contact and sensory perception. At first, Vera does not even seem to feel the heat of the flame that Robert uses to “caress” her skin (Figure 3), leading Rob White and Paul Julian Smith to conclude Alphaville: Journal of Film and Screen Media Issue 7, Summer 2014 4 that this is a film all about desensitisation, disaffection and a deficit of feeling, one that is ultimately as “surgically chilly” as its protagonist, Robert (White and Smith).

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